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'The Last Showgirl' Embodies Our Changing Attitude Toward Sex Workers

‘The Last Showgirl’ Embodies Our Changing Attitude Toward Sex Workers


Not so long ago, sex workers had a less than rosy image in the movies, and in the culture at large. For starters, they weren’t called “sex workers.” When Demi Moore played one in 1996, the title of that movie was “Striptease.” And in reviews I’ve written of more movies than I can count, I’ve referred to people who get paid to have sex with their clients as “prostitutes.” The newfound stigmatization of that word — and of the word “stripper” — represents a sea change in how sex work is perceived: not as a special, sordid, semi-underground occupation but simply as…work.

You can sense how big the change is if you think back to “Showgirls,” released 30 years ago. Sure, it was an infamous bad movie (one that has since been reclaimed for the glitzy camp flash with which it embraced the sleaze of the Vegas fleshpot milieu). But part of the original rap on “Showgirls” was that critics, nearly all of them men, sneered at the movie because it dared to celebrate, with a kind of shameless effrontery, something as “low” as aspiring to be a Vegas showgirl. Didn’t Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi know that her dreams were trash?  

To see how things have evolved, look no further than “The Last Showgirl,” the scrappy, tough-minded little indie-drama-that-could in which Pamela Anderson, the former jiggle queen of “Baywatch,” reclaims not just the profession of Vegas showgirl but her very identity as an actor who was packaged by the male-gaze machine. Anderson’s performance has generated major awards buzz (as of this writing, she could get an Oscar nomination), which may sound like a sentimental salute. Is the buzz really about her acting? Or is it about our new eagerness to “reframe” a performer best known as a walking weekly network-TV pin-up — and then as the victim of a leaked sex tape?

Actually, it’s both. In “The Last Showgirl,” Anderson is stripped of cosmetic cover, so that she looks like one of those tabloid photos in a “Stars Without Their Makeup” gallery. But it’s not just her face that’s bare; so are her emotions. As Shelly, an aging burlesque dancer who has no plan for what to do after the relic of a Vegas revue she’s in closes down (which is about to happen), Anderson, I’m not kidding, has a spiritually exposed aura that’s less Pam Anderson than Bibi Andersson. And though she still talks in that breathy sex-kitten voice, in “The Last Showgirl” Anderson’s wrecked Marilyn delivery is an emblem of raw anguish. It expresses Shelly’s flirtatious wiles and, at the same time, the broken soul that’s clinging to them like a life raft.

Does being a Vegas showgirl even qualify as “sex work”? Given that it involves going topless, let’s say that it’s on the spectrum. And it’s a sign of what a sharply drawn movie “The Last Showgirl” is that after Shelly’s estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), watches her mom perform in Le Razzle Dazzle, she dismisses it as a dumb nudie show; the film makes us feel like she’s right. But then Shelly stands up for herself, calling the show “the last remaining descendant of Parisian lido culture.” And she’s right too. Her real sin was one of negligence: leaving Hannah in the car as a girl while Shelly danced, pursuing her dream. She was addicted to the lure of performance, even in kitsch feathers and sequins. The film’s dramatic nuance is that it views Shelly as a “stripper” and as a stubborn artist of burlesque. She was selfish and a derelict mother. But she had a dream.

What’s resonant about “The Last Showgirl,” and what feels new about it, is that in its shaggy indie way it investigates what that dream was. The director, Gia Coppola, and the screenwriter, Kate Gersten, use Shelly’s story to deconstruct the history of what doffing your clothes for money really means: the toll it takes, the choices it reflects, the lure it represents. The film reclaims Pamela Anderson as an actor, and part of what she achieves is to reclaim the humanity of so many women, not so different from herself, who took on a role the world insisted on seeing as “degraded,” perhaps because it couldn’t see them.



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